Maite Conde is University Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Jesus College Cambridge. She is the author of Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro (2011) and Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (forthcoming 2018).
Maite Conde
Contributions
Cinema and the Invention of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s Capital of the Twentieth Century
Turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro: this period was a time of radical changes for what was then Brazil’s capital. These changes intended to make the city Brazil’s “capital of the twentieth century” (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin). Rio’s transformations were part of broader changes taking place in the country. In 1888 slavery had been abolished in Brazil, followed a year later by the ousting of the imperial family. These events marked the start of the First Republic (1889-1930) and signaled a new era for the country. Once in power, the Republican government set out to reinvent the country’s identity. The former colony’s peripheral character was to be a thing of the past. Incorporating European imperial ideas that promoted universal values of civilization and progress, the elite turned its back on Brazil’s rural, slave-holding history to rewrite its identity as a modern nation-state, a nation of order and progress, as the new flag announced–one equal to any other on the Western world.